Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies

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I can’t get enough of pumpkin this month. Today, we decided to start our week by making pumpkin chocolate chip cookies for ourselves and some extras to take to our new neighbors. I looked at a half-dozen recipes online that claimed to be healthy and was really surprised to see that most of them included white table sugar and white flour. Sure, adding pumpkin puree to a recipe does add nutritional value, making the sweet treat “healthier”, but a recipe loaded with white flour and white sugar (and some with nasty vegetable oil) really shouldn’t have healthy in the title.

I’m pointing this out to clarify that online recipes are no different from packaged products on grocery store shelves. We can’t assume the recipe is healthy just because the author uses the word in the title. We need to read the ingredients. On the flip side, any cookie you make at home is probably healthier than store bought and it only takes a few minor tweaks to make the recipe “healthier”. But remember, even when using the best ingredients, a cookie is a cookie, and these are no different.

This is a fun, sweet, delicious fall recipe. The ingredients are modified to minimize the blood sugar spike and add as much nutritional value as possible, but we should still enjoy them in moderation, as difficult as that may be because these really are SO good!

Hi Dianna – If you don’t have coconut sugar you can use a variety of other sweeteners like brown sugar, pure maple syrup, organic cane sugar, brown rice syrup, turbinado, sucanat…these are all natural sweeteners that you can find at most grocery stores or online from Amazon or Vitacost.com. I would avoid Splenda if at all possible. Here’s why. http://www.doctoroz.com/videos/artificial-sweeteners-and-other-food-substitutes-dangerous-your-health If you don’t have time to pick up a natural sweetener before making the cookies I’d use white table sugar or brown sugar over Splenda. Yes, you can use whole milk or 2% milk in place of the almond milk. Hope that helps!